Wednesday, November 16, 2011

I only thought I was done. Shortly after I mailed my painting off, I got a phone call saying they (the publishers) were having some problems with the scans. They where too light and the faces were washing out. So, they sent everything back. I had to repaint all of the faces and a lot of the backgrounds. I ended up scanning everything at kinkos and doing a lot more corrections in photo shop. Plus they didn't like my bio photo. They wanted a more professional look, so I trotted off to Sears. Sears put all of my shots on to a disk for me, I am so glad they included the un-retouched photos, because they where the ones I liked the best. I am almost afraid to say....Now I am done. Except for the logo that I am working on for the author.

Here is my new photo from Sears, thank goodness for photo shop. I have a weird bump on the side of my nose from a skin cancer that was removed and left a scar and a bump. The lighting at the portrait studio made it look bigger. Did I say bigger? It made it look huge. A little clone tool and you can barely see it at all. I wish I had taken a few of the wrinkles out as well.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The cover art work for my first 32 page picture book "Just Because" by Amber Housey. What a learning experience.

I had to submit a head shot for the book cover eek! I can't tell you how many pictures we took.

Here I am busy at work.

At last finally done. Yeah!! At this point all that was left to do was the cover, my photo and my bio, another eek.

Just a few examples of work from sketch to final art work.

The publisher didn't like the white background, they wanted some color.

Again no white background.

The whole process of illustrating 28 pages, the cover and 2 spot illustrations, took me almost a year. The publisher was very patient with me. My dad died this past Sept. and I am the executor of his estate. The amount of phone calls and paper work that had to be either signed, signed and notarized, sent, filed or shredded was incredible. For months it seems this took up all of my time. If I wasn't physically doing something for the estate I was thinking of what had to be done next. Thank you again, Nelson Publishing for allowing me more time to finish.